Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

The Gold of Mayani by Walter Satterthwait

“Dead,” said Dr. Murmajee, small stubby hands clasped together below the round swell of stomach. As always on these occasions, he wore a sagging black suit, a limp white shirt, a drooping black tie flecked with soup stains, and a frown whose solemnity was not entirely persuasive. Staring down at the bed, he nodded with elaborate sadness. “Quite dead, oh my yes.”

“Yes,” said Sergeant Andrew Mbutu patiently. “To be frank, doctor, that is a fact I was able to determine for myself. I was hoping that you might be able to add to it.”

“Ah,” said Murmajee. He turned to Andrew, thick eyebrows raised in the round Indian face. “There will be an autopsy?” Fascinated by the innards of Wazungu, Europeans. As though he expected to find, hidden among them, some hitherto overlooked gland whose secretions produced white skins, internal combustion engines, computers, imperialism.

“Yes,” said Andrew. “Certainly.” Give the dog his bone. “But in the meantime, what can you tell us about the corpse?”

“Ah,” said Murmajee, lower lip in a thoughtful pout. “Ah. Well, the knife, I should say — without committing myself precisely at this point in time, of course — I should say that the knife is rather suggestive. Yes? Wouldn’t you agree, sergeant?”

“Yes, doctor,” said Andrew, and sighed. Futile. No commitment until after the autopsy, lest someone pilfer the doctor’s new prize.

Little doubt, however, that the knife in question was indeed suggestive. Its black plastic handle, loosely encircled by stiff white fingers, protruded like a long, obscene power switch, set to off, from the solar plexus of the corpse.

The naked body lay on its back, open eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The single sheet — pale blue Egyptian cotton, befitting the luxurious bed of this luxury suite in this luxury hotel — was drawn up neatly to the man’s waist. As though the man, pre-death, had opted for an appearance of post-death modesty, despite the inherent and ultimate immodesty of suicide.

Assuming, of course, that this was in fact a suicide.

“The angle, you see,” said Murmajee. “There is no telling, oh my no, until we determine the length of the blade. But the angle is just exactly right, you see.”

Murmajee bent forward, peering at the knife. “A pushbutton stiletto. Italian, I should think. A narrow blade, and likely long enough to penetrate the heart very nicely, yes. Not much exterior bleeding, as you see. Death would have been quite sudden. Shock, internal hemorrhage. Poof, eh?”

“The wound could have been self-inflicted?” Andrew asked him.

“Ah,” said Murmajee, pouting again. “Ah. Self-inflicted. Could have been, yes. Possibly. And could have been otherwise.” He shook his head. “Perhaps after the autopsy...?”

Behind the two of them, standing at the long wooden dresser, Constable Kobari called out, “Sergeant?”

Andrew turned. Kobari was holding up — carefully, fingertips dainty along its edges — a worn leather wallet. “It was under the dresser,” he told Andrew.

“Excuse me, doctor,” Andrew said to Murmajee, and left him bending over the body while he crossed the room to Kobari.

Kobari laid the wallet on the dresser top and stepped back. Andrew slipped his pen from his shirt pocket. He said in Swahili to Kobari, “You should’ve left it there until the Technical Unit took their photographs.”

Kobari grinned. “If I had, sergeant, photographs wouldn’t be the only thing they’d have taken. There’s money inside.”

Andrew nodded glumly; wouldn’t be the first time evidence had vanished from a crime scene.

Using the pen, he eased the wallet open. Behind a scuffed transparent plastic screen was a driver’s license made out to Bradford Quentin, who lived, who had lived, on a street in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States of America. The picture matched the face on the bed. The man’s birthdate was April 7,1936.

Fifty-three years old, then. He looked very fit for fifty-three. Except, of course, for the small matter of being dead.

Gingerly, with the pen and the tip of his index finger, Andrew pried open the money compartment. Three bills in there, each a hundred U.S. dollars. Other than those and the driver’s license, the wallet was empty. No credit cards, no business cards, no photographs of beaming wife and beaming children.

Andrew asked Kobari, “Could the wallet have fallen under the dresser accidentally?”

Kobari shook his head. “It has a backboard, this dresser, that reaches to the floor. I think he put it there deliberately, to hide it.”

Andrew frowned. “If he were about to commit suicide, why would he hide his wallet?”

Kobari shrugged: Who knew why Wazungu did the lunatic things they did?

Andrew said, “His plane ticket.”

Kobari looked puzzled. “Sergeant?”

“In order to get here from this Atlanta, Georgia, he had to take a plane, or possibly a boat. Where is the ticket?”

“I don’t know, sergeant. It’s not under the dresser.”

They found the tickets — two of them — in the interior pocket of a white linen jacket hanging in the closet. Bradford Quentin had flown from the United States to the capital on the fifth of the month, and on the feeder flight from the capital to the Township on the sixth, yesterday. According to the tickets, he was due to return to the capital on the eighth, and to the U.S. on the ninth.

Standing outside the closet door, Andrew tapped the tickets lightly with his finger. “If he were planning suicide, why would he buy a ticket all the way to Africa? And a return ticket at that? He could’ve killed himself more conveniently, and more cheaply, in Atlanta, Georgia.”

“Perhaps he became suddenly depressed when he arrived,” said Kobari. “Culture shock.”

“A suicidal culture shock?”

“But, sergeant, if he arrived only yesterday, how could he have made an enemy who hated him badly enough to kill him?”

Andrew nodded. “We shall have to discover where he went yesterday, and with whom he spent time.”

“Sergeant?”

Dr. Murmajee, approaching from the bed.

“Yes, doctor?” Andrew said.

“I’ve done all I can at the moment. I won’t be able to add anything, I’m very much afraid, until after the autopsy.”

“Your conclusions, doctor?”

“Ah,” said Murmajee sadly. “Conclusions. Well, of course, as I say, everything is tentative until—”

“Can you estimate the time of death?” Andrew asked him.

Blinking, Dr. Murmajee said, “Oh my, certainly, sergeant, if you like. Lividity has progressed very nicely indeed, and rigor too, and the body has cooled down extremely well. Convenient for our purposes, eh, these air conditioners? I should say that death occurred, oh my, perhaps eight or nine hours ago. Roughly speaking, of course.”

Andrew looked at his watch. Ten thirty now. So between one thirty and two thirty this morning. Roughly speaking.

“Anything else, doctor?”

“Well, yes, there is one thing. Rather curious, I think. You might want to take a look, eh?”

Andrew and Kobari followed him over to the bed where the doctor, bending forward, ran his finger along the edge of the dead man’s palm.

“Most curious,” he said. “He seems to have developed a long callus sort of affair, right along this area. On both hands. From the tip of the little finger all the way down to the wrist. Clearly the man was in excellent physical shape, like someone who did manual labor, yes? But there are no calluses on the palms, only along here. Now what could have caused them, I wonder?”

“Karate,” said Constable Kobari.

Andrew and the doctor looked at the constable.

“You practice with sandbags,” Kobari explained to Andrew. “Hitting them.” He made a short chopping gesture. “It’s to toughen the hands. You see, sergeant, I have this callus myself.”

Andrew looked at the outstretched right hand. “Where?”

Kobari turned his hand around, brought it toward his face, and glared at it, frowning. Bringing up his left hand, he ran his fingers along the ridge of his right. Triumphantly, victory snatched from the palms of defeat, he said, “Here, sergeant, it’s there, you can feel it.”

Andrew touched the ridge of Kobari’s hand and located an area that might, with some charity, have been considered an incipient callus.

“You do karate?” he asked the constable.

“Yes,” said Kobari, putting his hands in his pockets before they had an opportunity to betray him again. “With Bwana Draper. He was in the Special Air Services in England.”

“Ah.” Andrew was momentarily entertained by an image of Kobari bounding about the room, hands chopping, feet flailing, a deadly Oriental dervish whirling into a blur.

His entertainment was short lived, however. For just then a hubbub at the door of the hotel suite announced that the Technical Unit had arrived with their cameras and measuring tapes and fingerprint powders.

At five o’clock that afternoon, just as Andrew finished typing up his last report of the day, Cadet Inspector Moi of the C.I.D. sauntered around the partition that separated Andrew’s cubicle from Sergeant Oto’s. Moi’s pastel jumpsuit was today of a hue that Andrew decided was most probably cerise. The jumpsuits were an affectation which, like the plummy B.B.C. accent and the precisely trimmed goatee, Moi had acquired during his exchange year at London’s Scotland Yard. He had also acquired, no one quite knew how, the notion that he was a cunning sleuth.

“Had a few moments free,” Moi announced. “Thought we’d get together on this knifing thing.” He eased himself into the empty chair, lightly tugged up his pants to spare their crease, then languidly crossed one long leg over the other, knee atop knee. “Suicide, of course. No doubt of it at all, eh?”

Andrew sat back against his chair. “And what of the wallet?”

Moi shrugged easily. “Who knows? Chap probably hid the thing all the time, whenever he was traveling. Creature of habit, eh? Did it without even thinking about it. Automatic.”

“And he flew all the way here from the United States to commit suicide?”

Another comfortable shrug. “There are stranger things in heaven and earth than you’ve dreamt of in your philosophy, Yorick.”

Andrew frowned, puzzled.

“Look here, sergeant,” said Moi with great reasonableness. “I just spoke with Murmajee. He’s convinced that suicide was possible, if not probable. Tech Unit says the only prints on the knife were Quentin’s. And you’ve seen all the reports. Chap arrived on the seven thirty flight from Nairobi, went directly to the hotel. Had dinner alone, talked to no one, went off alone to his room. Next thing we know, he’s skewered. What else could it be but suicide?”

“Perhaps he met someone in Nairobi—”

“ ’Fraid not,” said Moi. “Nairobi police had a go at that. Same thing there. Arrived at three in the afternoon, day before yesterday. Spent the night in his hotel room. Came down next day for breakfast and lunch, went back to his room afterward, both times. Checked out at five, caught a taxi for the airport. Met no one, talked to no one.” Moi brushed a bit of lint from his pants. “And look, suppose he had. Suppose he made some enemy in Nairobi. How’d this other chap get here in time to poke him? Seven thirty plane was the only one in yesterday. And he didn’t come in with him — you’ve checked the passengers, right?”

Andrew nodded. Six tourists, four of them from Holland, two from Germany. A local European family: the Hendersons, mother, father, daughter, son, returning from a visit to the capital. Two local nurses returning from some medical conference. None of these had a motive, none had any apparent connection to the deceased, all had an alibi.

“There it is, then,” Moi said. “Suicide. Plain as the nose on your face.”

“Why the return trip ticket?”

Another shrug. “Used to be a requirement for entry into the country.”

Back in the sixties and seventies, when the government tried to halt the flood of hippies. “Yes,” Andrew said, “but no longer.”

“Chap didn’t know that, obviously.”

“Perhaps. I still find it puzzling that the man would come here to kill himself. A journey of some thousands of miles, only to commit suicide?”

“Puzzling, yes, fair enough, but perhaps he’d simply gone off the beam. Eh? Happens, you know. Chap lived alone in the States — just got that from the police in Atlanta. No family, no close friends. Retired. Spent most of his time brooding, probably. Nursing old wounds. Just snapped suddenly. Went bonkers, eh? Decided to go out in style. Bought the knife, bought the air ticket, came here, had a good meal or two, then stuck himself. Simple.”

The man lying on that bed had not struck Andrew as the sort to brood. Superbly fit for his age, for any age, and trained in a sophisticated martial art. Highly trained, judging by those calluses. A man who, confronted with a problem, would deal with it directly, forcefully.

Long spatulate fingers stroking his goatee, Moi studied Andrew. “Look here, Mbutu. You’re not going to go running around town asking more questions, are you?”

Andrew frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve done it often enough before, haven’t you. Taken a case that’s as good as wrapped up, and worried it, poked at it, sniffed around till you came up with some outrageous, contrary solution. Turned out to be right a fair amount of the time, I admit that. All very clever, of course, credit where credit is due, but I don’t mind telling you it’s made the C.I.D. look like nincompoops.”

Andrew resisted the temptation to point out that certain individuals within the C.I.D. could contrive to look like nincompoops without any help whatever.

Brow furrowed, immensely serious, Moi said, “I mean, criminal investigations, man, that’s our job, isn’t it? So suppose we just take it as given, you and I, that this one is solved, eh? What d’you say? A little esprit de corps. Harmony in the ranks and all that.”

“What of the knife?”

Moi sat back, sighing. “What about the knife?”

“A switchblade. An uncommon weapon here. Illegal.”

Moi held out his hand. “Well, there you are, eh? He brought it with him. Everyone’s got them in the States. Boy Scouts, housewives, babes in the cradle.”

“If he brought it with him, why was it not noticed at customs, and confiscated?”

“What, rolled up in a pair of knickers? How on earth would they spot it?”

“It would have shown on the fluoroscopes.”

Moi smiled his celebrated Lestrade-trouncing smile and held up his long index finger. “Not if he checked his bag. They don’t fluoroscope checked baggage, you see.”

Sherlock Moi, Master of the Obvious.

Andrew said, “There were no baggage claim tickets among his effects.”

“Good Lord, man, he threw them away. Who keeps the bloody things?” Moi shook his head, sighed theatrically, made his face go from exasperated to earnest, and said, “Look. Sergeant Mbutu. Andrew. Let’s be reasonable about it. This was a suicide, plain and simple. Even if it were something else, which I tell you is impossible, we’ve virtually no way of proving it. I know the chief’s got a lot of respect for your opinion. As well he should, of course. And I know he’ll ask you for your feelings. I’d like to close this case out so we can get on with police business.” What was this case, Andrew wondered, if not police business? “Man to man now,” said Moi, “can’t you just let it go?”

Regretfully, Andrew admitted to himself that for perhaps the first time since Andrew had known him, Moi might be right. There was, as he’d said, no way of proving this anything but a suicide.

Andrew nodded. “Very well.”

Moi’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “You mean it?”

Andrew nodded. “So long as no new evidence appears.”

“Oh, it won’t, it won’t. Not a chance of it.” He stood up, smoothed down his pants, and, grinning happily, held out his hand to Andrew. “Good man. Glad we had this little chat. Enjoyed it. If I can ever do you a good turn, you let me know. One hand washes the other, eh? Ha ha.”

“Andrew? Andrew.”

Reluctantly, Andrew opened his eyes. Mary lay beside him, her elbow propped against the bed, her face peering down at his. Mary’s face was an object upon which he had gazed for years with fondness and gratitude, and frequently with amazement at its beauty; but at the moment, given a choice, he would have preferred the interior of his eyelids. “Uh,” he said.

Mary said, “There’s someone at the door.”

“Uh,” he said. He turned to look at the clock on the night-stand. Two o’clock. “Impossible,” he breathed, and closed his eyes.

“Andrew,” she said, and gently shook his shoulder.

This time Andrew heard it: a firm insistent rapping at the front door.

He opened his eyes.

“You see?” said Mary.

“Uh,” he said. With a prolonged, pained expiration, sigh and groan combined, he sat up and swung his legs off the bed. His head flopped forward, threatening to topple off his neck, roll down his chest, go bouncing like a soccer ball across the floor.

Moonlight spilled between the curtains. The night was silent.

The rapping came again. An ominous sound in the stillness. Doors that were knocked upon in the middle of the night seldom opened onto anything pleasant.

“Uh,” he said, and pulled himself to his feet. Fumbling in the wardrobe, he found a freshly starched shirt — even Destiny might balk at Mary’s starch — and fumbled into it. Found a pair of pants and stumbled into those. Then shuffled out the door and across the moonlit sitting room, an obstacle course of dump trucks and racing cars and tiny spiked motorbikes. He stepped on something hard and sharp, and he jumped.

He bent down, picked it up. An item called an action figure, a futuristic soldier of indestructible plastic. Another diabolical invention of the United States.

He reached the door, unlatched it, pulled it open.

On the moonlit landing, Constable Duhanni. Standing at stiff attention, looking himself rather like an overgrown action figure awaiting orders. New, of course: only three weeks in the constabulary.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” said Constable Duhanni.

Andrew waved away the apology and discovered that he still held the plastic figure. Frowning, he tucked it away in his shirt pocket. “All right, constable. What is it?”

“They want you at the station, sir.”

“They? Who?”

“The Assistant Minister, sir.”

Andrew stopped in mid-yawn. “The assistant minister of what?”

“The Interior, sir. And his assistant, sir.”

“The Assistant Assistant Minister?” His mind foggy, Andrew briefly wondered if he were asleep still, and dreaming, and doomed to play insane word games until he awoke howling in terror. “Why do they want me?”

“I don’t know, sir. The chief only told me to come fetch you, sir.”

“The chief is there?”

“Yes, sir.”

The presence of assistant ministers, and their assistants, meant it was something serious; the presence of the chief, at any time after five o’clock in the afternoon, meant it was something earthshaking.

“These ministry people,” Andrew said. “When did they arrive?”

“An hour ago, sir. They came in by helicopter from the capital, sir.”

Something serious indeed.

Constable Duhanni said, “I’ll wait in the car, sir.”

“That’s all right, constable. You go on ahead. I’ll take my moped.”

The constable’s eyes blinked. “Sorry, sir. Orders, sir. I’m supposed to bring you in the car, sir.”

Andrew frowned. “What, am I under arrest?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Duhanni, blinking some more. “No, of course not. It’s just that the chief, sir, he was very firm about it, sir.”

About what, in fact, was the chief not firm?

“All right,” Andrew said. “I’ll be out in a moment. And, constable?”

“Sir?”

“There’s no need to call me sir. Sergeant will do.”

“Yes, sir, sergeant.”

“Ah, sergeant,” said the chief from behind his desk. “Please come in. This is Bwana Nu, the Assistant Minister of the Interior. And this is his associate, Bwana Teggay. Gentlemen, Sergeant Mbutu.”

The two men stood. As protocol demanded, Andrew shook hands first with Bwana Nu.

The chief was a big man, but Minister Nu was huge. Gigantic, enormous: looking like nothing so much as an extremely well fed cartoon cannibal who had been polished to a high gloss and then stuffed into a black suit several sizes too snug. Towering over Andrew, his teeth gleaming like a piano keyboard through his grin, he jerked Andrew’s arm up and down as though he were trying to pump water up from thirty meters below ground.

“Pleased to meet you, sergeant,” he beamed. “Pleased to meet you. The chief here, he’s been relating some of your adventures. Amazing stories, too. And you’re one of his most excellent men, isn’t that right?”

He let go of Andrew’s hand; with difficulty, Andrew bit back a hiss of relief. “Well, minister,” he said weakly. “There are many fine officers in the constabulary.”

“Ha ha ha,” boomed Minister Nu, and clapped him on the shoulder. Andrew staggered slightly to the side. “And modest, too,” said Nu. “I entirely admire a man with the modesty. Maybe because I don’t have any myself.” He boomed again: “Ha ha ha. We’re gonna get along just fine, sergeant. You say hello now to my assistant here.”

Bwana Teggay was an altogether different order of being. Slim, slight, Andrew’s height, he wore a suit of tropical weight charcoal-grey wool, its pinstripes so subtle they might have been imaginary, its tailoring so sleek it might have been devised by the man’s own genes. He was young, in his early thirties, Andrew’s age. His small brown eyes were clear and sharp; his smile was as trim and taut as the man himself.

“How do you do, sergeant,” he said crisply, and crisply he shook Andrew’s hand. “Sorry to drag you out like this in the middle of the night. Have a seat, please, and the minister will explain why we called you in.”

After Teggay and Nu had seated themselves, the minister taking a few moments to settle his bulk comfortably within the chair, Andrew sat. He glanced at the chief. The chief’s face was empty. The chief’s face was always empty.

“Well now,” said Nu, beaming as he leaned forward and planted heavy forearms atop knees the size of pineapples. “That man you found this morning in the hotel room. Who do you think that man was?”

“Quentin Bradford, you mean?” Andrew said.

“Ha ha,” said the minister with a great grin. “Well, sure, my friend, that’s what his passport says. You bet you. That’s what his driving license says. But that’s not what the Ministry of Records says. No sir.”

“The Ministry of Records?”

“That’s right, my friend,” Nu grinned. “That man in the hotel room, that man was Robert Atlee.”

Andrew hesitated. “Robert Atlee,” he said blankly.

Minister Nu frowned: puzzled, perhaps, to find himself in anticlimax when he had so obviously been promoting high drama. “You don’t know this name? Robert Atlee?”

“No, minister, I’m sorry I... oh. Atlee? Robert Atlee? The Englishman friend of Abraham Mayani?”

Minister Nu sat back with a satisfied grin, order having evidently been restored to the universe. “That’s the one. You bet you.”

“But — why? That was over thirty years ago. Why would he come back here now?”

“Ha ha ha,” boomed the minister happily. “That’s what we want you to find out.”

“Me?” He glanced at the chief. Nothing.

“We’re gonna take you out of the police for a while and put you to work for us. You’re gonna be like a private detective, eh? Like Mike Hammer. You ever read this Mike Hammer?”

“No. I am afraid not, minister.”

“Very good stuff, my friend. One time this Mike Hammer chap, he’s gotta go somewhere, see, and he doesn’t wanna leave the villain alone. So what he does, he nails that villain’s hand to the floor! With a sledgehammer!” Gleefully, he slapped his massive thigh. “Ha ha ha. Very good stuff. The best. I’ll send you some of these books, okay?”

“Yes,” Andrew said. “Thank you, yes. But I do not entirely understand what you wish of me, minister.”

Nu held up a hand as big as a flounder. “Don’t you worry. Jimmy here’s gonna fill you in with all the details.” He hauled himself to his feet. “Right now I’ve gotta go and utilize the phone. Chief, you wanna come and have that drink?”

“Of course,” said the chief, and stood. “But if I might add something, minister?”

Nu waved expansively. “You bet you, chief. Absolutely.”

“Sergeant, you should understand that the decision as to whether you assist the ministry will be entirely your own. Your participation will be voluntary. Isn’t that correct, minister?”

“Absolutely. You bet you. Voluntary is absolutely correct.” Nu was beaming happily, but his glance held the chief’s, and Andrew had a sudden sense of undercurrents here, of powerful human wills brought abruptly into conflict. For an instant, the office walls contracted.

The chief’s glance never wavered.

“Well,” said Bwana Teggay into the silence. “I’ll just put Sergeant Mbutu in the picture, then, shall I?”

Minister Nu turned to him and said, “Good, Jimmy, you do that.” The walls snapped back to their original size. “Come along, chief,” he grinned. “Let’s get that drink.”

“Now,” said Bwana Teggay. “What do you know, sergeant, about Abraham Mayani?”

Andrew shrugged. “I know he operated during The Troubles as a kind of... Robin Hood figure.”

Teggay savored this for a moment, and then smiled his trim, taut smile. “Robin Hood, yes. As good a description as any. And about Robert Atlee?”

“Mayani’s friend. One of the few Wazungu who fought against the colonials.”

“Yes,” he said with the small prim nod of a schoolmaster. “The only one, actually. Up until 1953, Mayani and Atlee were both sergeants in the G.S.U.” Before Independence, the paramilitary branch of the constabulary. In the early fifties, it had grown to the size of the regular army. “They’d been raised together here in your township — Atlee’s father owned the Atlee Ginnery, and Mayani’s father was his foreman. There was talk that Atlee had been involved with Mayani’s sister, Rebecca, but no proof was ever adduced. Just another part of the myth, no doubt. According to the legends, Atlee slept with half the women in the country, African and European alike.”

Andrew nodded: he had heard the legends.

“As I’m sure you know,” Teggay continued, “those were years of turmoil. Our Great Leader was still in prison, but cells of Freedom Fighters were operating throughout the country, striking everywhere. There was even a clandestine organization within the G.S.U. itself. Mayani was an obvious candidate for this group — he was intelligent, physically strong, and extremely charismatic. He was approached, but he declined to join them. His political awareness hadn’t quite achieved ripeness, apparently.”

This said without even a glimmer of irony. Andrew felt his first prickle of unease.

“What radicalized Mayani was the murder of his father and sister. The father, Joseph, was one of the activists calling for a general strike — a politically more sophisiticated man, apparently, than his son. For weeks he was harassed by the police, both the regular branch and G.S.U. Finally, on the night of June 21, he was attacked in his house. He and his daughter were shot to death.”

Andrew nodded. “I read of this. The case never came to trial.”

Teggay smiled his small tight smile. “Hardly surprising, since the coroner’s report indicated that the weapon used was a Webley .45 automatic revolver. Which at the time, of course, was the service weapon of the constabulary.”

“Still, it was never proved that the police were responsible.”

Another smile, this time with an element in it almost of pity. “Not in a court of law, no.”

Scurry along, Andrew told himself. “It was at this time, was it not, that Mayani left the G.S.U.?”

“Yes. He applied for sympathetic leave, and the captain of his unit denied it. So Mayani simply deserted. He and Atlee both.”

“Atlee had applied for leave as well?”

“Yes. Also denied.” Teggay frowned slightly and glanced at the floor, as though trying to find there the thread of his narrative. He looked up. “The two of them were spotted by a G.S.U. squad at the funeral of Joseph and Rebecca Mayani. The G.S.U. gave chase, but Mayani and Atlee eluded them. For several weeks nothing was heard of either man. Then, in July, they burned to the ground a farmhouse belonging to their unit captain, thirty miles north of the capital. No one was hurt. The captain was away — chasing down a reported sighting of Mayani, as it happened — and Mayani and Atlee emptied the house at gunpoint.”

“As I recall,” said Andrew, “no one was ever hurt in any of Mayani’s operations.”

Another schoolmaster’s nod. “Correct. And throughout the next year, as more men joined him, there were a number of operations in the western part of the country, where he was hiding. Sabotage, mostly — bridges burned, train tracks dynamited. Most of these directed at the G.S.U. It was a hit and miss approach, tactically brilliant but strategically naive. Mayani simply failed to understand the importance of an organized, politically based guerrilla effort.”

“He never allied himself with any other group, as I recall,” said Andrew.

“Correct,” said Teggay. “He was an adventurer, unwilling to accept the idea of a centrally organized, firmly disciplined, democratic people’s liberation front.”

All this said, once again, with a perfectly straight face, providing Andrew his second prickle of unease.

“Then,” said Teggay, “in July of 1954, he pulled off his most ambitious effort. He robbed the constabulary payroll.”

“Yes,” Andrew said. “The Gold of Mayani.”

A brief nod. “Exactly. By then, the work of our Freedom Fighters had made a shambles of the economy. Merchants were refusing to accept the government’s currency. So the High Commissioner arranged for a shipment of gold from England. Twenty-five thousand British pounds, in sovereigns. To keep the shipment secret, he decided to have it delivered by sea, some two hundred kilometers north of here, and then bring it by lorry, under heavy guard, to the capital. It wasn’t an especially clever plan, but evidently he wasn’t an especially clever man. In any event, Mayani found out. He highjacked the shipment as it was being offloaded from the ship. He and Atlee, and the gold, were never seen again.”

“Some of his men were caught, as I recall.”

“Yes. And executed. But none would, or could, reveal anything about Mayani’s plans.”

“There was a famous pursuit.” Line drawings remembered from the secondary school history books: Mayani and Atlee dashing across the veldt on horseback, the wind tugging at their clothes.

“He was chased the length of the country,” said Teggay. “By the G.S.U. and the regular army. He was seen everywhere — including here, in your township. You know, of course, that his high school teacher, Daniel Tsuto, was living here.”

“And does still. A very old man now.”

“Yes. Something of a legend himself, I gather. He’s one of the people with whom we’d like you to talk.”

Suddenly realizing, Andrew said, “You believe that Robert Atlee came back for the gold.”

For the first time Teggay’s smile showed his teeth: small and pointed, like a rodent’s. “Full points, sergeant,” Teggay said. “Why else would he return?”

“Mayani, you think, is still alive?”

“Mayani’s dead,” he said curtly. “He was wounded during the highjacking — witnesses saw it happen.”

“The story is that he crossed the border to the west.”

“Legend,” said Teggay. “Myth. The man died of his wounds. Atlee hid the gold, escaped, and he’s only now come back to retrieve it.”

“Why wait so long?”

“Who knows? Perhaps he took with him enough to live comfortably for a while, and now it’s gone. Perhaps he was afraid for his life.”

“But he is seen here as a hero,” Andrew said. “He could have come back at any time, openly.”

Teggay’s smile was pitying once again. “Not to retrieve the gold. It’s the property of the government.”

“The British government?”

“Our government. The legally constituted government of this republic. Do you know how much that gold is worth now, sergeant?”

“Much more, I should think, than it was.”

“Close to three quarters of a million British pounds. Over a million U.S. dollars.”

Andrew frowned. “Why is it you want me to assist you? Why not conduct a full-scale investigation?”

Teggay shifted in his seat, crossed his legs. “We want to keep a low profile on this. If word gets out about the gold, we’d be overrun by treasure seekers. The minister will be returning to the capital within the hour. I’ll be checking into one of your hotels under an assumed name. Except for you and your chief, no one in the Township will ever know of the ministry’s interest in this case.”

If they believed that, both the minister and Bwana Teggay seriously underestimated the efficiency of Township gossip.

“Besides,” Teggay said, “you know the people here. They’ll be more likely to talk to you.”

Oh yes. Be stumbling over themselves in a rush to talk to him. As usual. “What makes you think the gold is here, in the Township?”

Raising his right eyebrow, Teggay said, “I should think that’s obvious. This was Atlee’s destination. He was due to return to the capital on the eighth. He wouldn’t’ve had time to range very far afield. And your chief told us tonight about the local legends. How it sometimes happens, when a family’s having hard times, that they suddenly find money on their doorstep. Left there during the night. The Gold of Mayani, the stories say.”

Andrew nodded. “It is true, yes, that people in such circumstances have found this money. But currency, not gold.”

Teggay shrugged lightly. “It’s a small matter to convert gold to currency. Any of the Asians in the local shops could do it. And discreetly, too — for a price. No, the gold is somewhere nearby.”

“And whoever has the gold is the person who killed Atlee?”

“Yes, of course,” said Teggay. Dismissively. Atlee’s murder clearly no concern of his.

“One thing, sergeant,” Teggay said. “I want you to understand this. As your chief pointed out, your cooperation is entirely voluntary. But if you choose to work with us, you’ll be paid double your usual wages. And, of course, your help will be greatly appreciated by the ministry.” He smiled. “As I’m sure you know, it doesn’t hurt to have friends in the ministry.”

The carrot, Andrew thought.

“On the other hand,” said Teggay smoothly, “it’s also perfectly true that it doesn’t help to have, shall we say, a lack of friends.”

And the stick.

“They want the gold,” I Andrew said.

“Of course,” Mary said. “The economy today is as bad as it was during The Troubles. We can use the gold.”

“They want the gold,” Andrew said, “for themselves. Not for the state, not for the ministry.”

They were in the kitchen, sipping cardamum-spiced coffee at the small, Formica-topped table. Dawn had arrived: between the curtains the sky had faded to the color of milk. Time, soon, to awaken the children.

Mary looked at him for a moment, finally frowned. “Andrew. Are you sure?”

“Why arrive in secret? Why assign me to this, and not some agent of the ministry? Why have me report, as Teggay insisted, only to Teggay? To maintain a low profile, yes, certainly. So low that if the gold is found, they can slip away with it.”

“Why would the minister come himself?”

“To impress the insignificant sergeant with the significance of his mission.”

“But if you do find the gold, then you’ll know—” she stopped suddenly, her mouth parted.

Andrew smiled at her over his coffee cup. “An insignificant sergeant in a tiny township can be dealt with easily enough.”

“You cannot do this,” she announced, setting down her cup. “You’ll have to tell them you cannot do this. Tell them some lie. Your son is sick. Your wife is hysterical.”

He smiled. “My wife is hysterical.”

“Andrew—”

“Too late,” he told her. “I have already agreed.”

“But why?”

“If I refuse, they can make life very difficult for me.” He sipped at his coffee. “And for you. And for the children.”

“We’ve had difficulties before. Better difficulties with you here, a part of us, than an easy life without you.”

“No one said anything about my not being here.”

“But what happens if you find that gold?”

“No one has found it in thirty years.”

“No one has looked. If you do find it—”

Andrew shrugged. “Some threats, perhaps. Perhaps a bribe.” He smiled again. “New action figures for the children.”

She shook her head. “Talk to the chief. He’ll do something, you know he will.”

“Yes, and then the chief and I will be in the same position.”

“But how do they justify this?”

“Taking the gold? I’m sure that Minister Nu would justify it simply on the basis that he wanted it. Teggay...” He smiled. “Teggay would devise some complicated argument proving that the gold belonged to him by historical necessity.”

“Andrew—”

“Too late, Mary,” he said.

“But what are you going to do?”

“Look for the gold,” he said. He smiled. “And pray I do not find it.”

Assistant Assistant Minister Teggay had generously told Andrew that he was free to select an assistant of his own. Andrew decided not to do so: Kobari was best left out of this. At eight in the morning, when the shops opened, he drove downtown perched in civilian clothes atop his moped. “Be discreet.” Teggay had said. “This isn’t a police inquiry, remember.”

From Muhammad Banir, Dealer in Rare Coins and Antiquities, he learned that twenty-five thousand British sovereigns would weigh almost exactly two hundred kilograms. Light enough to be carried by two men on horseback. (Although not for very long at the flared-nostril, wide-eyed gallop of those horses in the history books.) In wrapped rolls of fifty sovereigns each, the coins would take up approximately the space of four standard shoeboxes.

Fat Muhammad Banir, hugely amused by Andrew’s questions, asked him what he was attempting to do — track down the gold of Mayani? So much for discretion. By nightfall the entire Township would know of Sergeant Mbutu’s mad quest. Perhaps a good thing, Andrew realized. Safety in numbers.

No, Muhammad Banir told him with a grin, there had been no single individual who had, over the past thirty years, consistently exchanged gold sovereigns for currency.

Even if he were telling the truth, which in Banir’s case was approximately as likely as his lying, this meant nothing. There were other coin dealers in the Township; and as Teggay said, any of the thousand or so Indian shopkeepers would have been delighted to take gold.

Assuming that they had been given it. Assuming that the gold of Mayani were actually here. And assuming that whoever possessed it had been using it as a kind of private charitable fund for thirty years.

These were assumptions that Andrew was increasingly unwilling to make. He knew that money had been left surreptitiously at the homes of distressed families. (And by these, to sidestep envy, often surreptitiously spent.) He knew that local legend ascribed the charity to Mayani. But he also knew that local legends were frequently more a matter of desire than of fact. People wanted to believe Mayani alive: the money provided the “proof.”

Probably Atlee had taken the gold with him thirty years ago. Probably he’d spent it all. Probably, as Moi had said, as the evidence suggested, his death was a suicide. The gold gone, Atlee returned to Africa to end his life. Out of guilt, perhaps. In expiation.

As he drove away from Muhammad Benir’s shop, Andrew’s spirits began to rise.

The young woman smiled. Attractive, in her middle twenties, she wore a sleeveless bright yellow European-style dress, buttoned up the front and belted. She said to Andrew through the opened door: “My grandfather prefers to talk to guests in the shamba.” The garden. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Andrew told her.

Another smile. “That way then,” pointing to the right. “I’ll go fetch him.”

“Thank you,” said Andrew, and went round the small cinder block house, following a sandy pathway worn in the sparse grass.

Unlike most of the African shambas in the Township, this one was devoted not to vegetables and fruits but to flowers. The small square yard was fenced in by a tall wooden latticework on two sides; the third side, facing the house, was a cascade of roses, an explosion of color in the clear tropical sunlight, reds and pinks and whites and yellows so vibrant they seemed to shimmer.

In the shade of a trellis heavy with more of them, startled bursts of red against the glossy green, sat a round white metal table and four white metal chairs, paint flaking from all. Andrew had barely seated himself when the back door opened and the old man shuffled out. Andrew sprang to his feet: legends, face to face, deserved respect.

At least eighty years old now, tufted hair white, face eroded, cheeks sunken, the old man still held himself erect, a triumph of will over gravity and time. He wore black slacks, a pair of imitation leather slippers. A white European-style shirt, tieless, buttoned at the knobby wrists and at the corded neck, cuffs and collar both too large.

“Sergeant Mbutu,” said Daniel Tsuto, and held out a hand ropy with vein and ligament. Andrew took it; the man’s grip was firm, like his voice. “Sit, sit,” said the old man, waving Andrew back into his chair and then lowering himself into the chair opposite. Slowly, stiffly: Andrew could hear, almost, the old bones creak.

“I knew one of your teachers,” said the old man. “David Obutu. He was a student of mine, you know.”

“Yes, m’zee, I know.” M’zee a term of honor granted to elders.

“He was disappointed when you left the university.”

Andrew nodded. “Yes, m’zee. I had no choice.”

The old man returned the nod. “Yes, yes. Choice is often a luxury, eh? Beyond a certain point, only the gods have choices, and perhaps not even they.” He placed his hands, one atop the other, in his lap. In Swahili, he said, “How may I help you, sergeant?”

Andrew answered in the same language. “M’zee, I come to ask you about Robert Atlee and Abraham Mayani.”

The old man smiled. His teeth were large, rectangular, pale yellow like old ivory: dentures. “The constabulary is investigating legends now, sergeant?”

“Early yesterday morning, a man was found murdered at the Sinbad Hotel. The man was Robert Atlee.”

Daniel Tsuto’s smile vanished and his head darted suddenly backward against the collar of his shirt. “Robert Atlee? Here?” Clearly surprised.

“Yes, m’zee. He was stabbed.”

The old man frowned. Thoughtful, he looked off for a moment, as though eyeing the splendor of his rosebushes. He turned back to Andrew. “There’s no question that the man was Robert Atlee?”

“None. His fingerprints were sent to the Ministry of Records. Because all members of the G.S.U. had been fingerprinted, his were on file.”

Another frown. “They found them so quickly? In one day? Fast work for bureaucrats. And you are investigating his death?”

“Not exactly, m’zee. I am conducting a related, but separate, inquiry.”

“And what might that be?”

Discretion. “There are certain individuals in the government who believe that Robert Atlee returned here for a specific purpose. I have been assigned to determine—”

“The gold,” said Daniel Tsuto. Abruptly, he smiled. “This was the reason the secret ministry helicopter came here last night?”

Truly, certain secrets were hopeless in a township this size. Andrew smiled back. “Yes, m’zee.”

Daniel Tsuto’s laugh was raspy, smoky. “If they wanted to keep it secret, why land it at the airport, where the entire Township might see it? Why not land it somewhere outside?”

Andrew shrugged. “I don’t know, m’zee.”

The old man shook his head. “Fools. That fat swine Ronald Nu, I suppose? He still searches for the gold?”

“Still?” Rather unsettled at hearing a minister called a fat swine, no matter how aptly.

“He was here, in the Township, during The Troubles,” said Daniel Tsuto. “After Abraham took the gold. He sat, in fact, exactly where you sit now. And he was conducting—” another smile “—a separate inquiry, just as you are. He’s very fond, you see, of separate inquiries.”

“He was here in what capacity, m’zee?”

Just then, the door to the house swung open and Daniel Tsuto’s granddaughter emerged into the yard, carrying two large glasses of limeade. Smiling, she gave one to Andrew, who thanked her, and gave the other to Daniel Tsuto. “I had to go to the duka,” she said. The shop. “We were out of limes.”

“That bandit overcharges,” said the old man.

“Limes cost four times as much in Sweden,” she said cryptically.

“Because they make them out of snow.” He turned to Andrew. “She spent an exchange year in Sweden. Eating snow and counting her toes to make sure they hadn’t fallen off.”

She smiled at Andrew. “Grandfather doesn’t approve of Sweden.”

“Free love and snow. No wonder they kill themselves so often.” He smiled at the young woman. “Thank you, Joanna.”

She nodded, smiled again at Andrew, and left.

Daniel Tsuto turned to Andrew. He sipped his limeade. “In what capacity, you ask. He’d been here earlier that day, part of the official G.S.U. investigation, asking whether I’d seen Abraham. I’d told them no. Later he returned by himself. Told me he was seeing some girl in town, a nurse, who swore she’d seen Abraham near my house. Then he hinted he was more than he seemed. Well, that much I never doubted. He looks and acts like a buffoon, but he’s as sly as a jackal. A very dangerous man, sergeant. Take care with him.”

“What did he mean, ‘more than he seemed’?”

“He was implying that he was an officer of the secret faction within the G.S.U., the ‘freedom fighters.’ ” The old man’s lips curled with scorn as he said the phrase. “He suggested that his only concern was Abraham’s welfare. If I could help locate Abraham, Nu would help him escape.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same thing I’d told the others earlier. That I hadn’t seen Abraham.”

“Do you think it likely he told the truth? About being an officer of the secret faction?”

The old man shrugged. “I know he told the truth. He was the man who tried to recruit Abraham into this group.”

Andrew took a sip of limeade. “Abraham Mayani told you this?”

A small nod. “Yes.”

“When?”

The old man lifted a hand and waved it vaguely. “Sometime long before.” He leaned slightly forward. “Did you know, sergeant, that Abraham’s father and sister were murdered?”

“Yes. No arrest was ever made.”

The old man nodded. “They were murdered only two weeks after Abraham refused to join Nu’s organization.” He sat back.

Andrew sipped again at his drink, found that it tasted suddenly sour. “You think,” he said, “that Ronald Nu ordered the murders.”

“Not ordered. No, a subordinate might later talk. I believe he killed them himself.”

“To anger Abraham Mayani. To bring him into his group.”

“Exactly.”

“Did Mayani believe this?”

“Bah. Abraham. He was a fool. Running around the countryside. Blowing up bridges. A boy playing at pirates and cowboys. Lawrence of Arabia.”

“What should he have done, then?” Andrew asked. “Joined the freedom fighters?”

“Freedom fighters.” More scorn. “Oh yes, very well-intentioned, very noble souls, most of them. Until they finally obtained the pie for which they’d been fighting. Then of course they became politicians, and split it up among themselves.” He picked up his limeade, brought it to his lips.

Andrew asked the old man, “What do you think he should have done, m’zee?”

Daniel Tsuto set down the glass. Suddenly he smiled. “Who can say, sergeant? Certainly not an old man like I. He should have studied flowers, perhaps.” He waved his hand toward the wall of flowers. “Planted roses.” Another smile. “Who can say?”

Andrew said, “What do you think happened to him?”

The old man shrugged lightly. “He died, of course. I understand he was wounded during the highjacking. We all die, sergeant. Abraham. A rose. You and I.”

“And the gold?”

“Lost. Gone forever. Buried, probably, before he died.”

“Do you think Atlee knew of its location?”

“Perhaps. We shall never know.”

At the public library Andrew spent over an hour and discovered several suggestive facts. He also discovered — and took along with him, to read later — an old history book with a picture in it of Abraham Mayani and Robert Atlee. According to the caption, the black and white photograph had been taken by one of Mayani’s men, just before the attack on the gold shipment. The two men stood side by side in battered military khakis, bareheaded, grinning in the glare of sunlight, each with an arm over the other’s shoulder. Mayani was slightly shorter than Atlee, but even so he seemed the more impressive of the two. Both were handsome men, but Mayani’s grin was wider, bolder. He seemed more vital, more vigorous; seemed not only to draw comfort from his youth and strength, as Atlee did, but to revel in them.

The Atlee in the photograph was recognizable, just, as the same man who had lain dead on the bed at the Sinbad. The younger version and the older could have been two separate people. And of course — despite the resemblance, despite their sharing some long-ago early years — they were.

Even in here, in the office, hung the cloying smell of disinfectant. A small fan shuddered at the open window, but served only to stir the dense, warm air sluggishly around the narrow room.

The white-uniformed woman sitting on the far side of the desk was in her fifties, big, heavyset, her face round and jowly, her eyes pinched between rolls of flesh. Her two front teeth were gold. A most formidable personage.

Andrew said, “You were on the plane from the capital, matron. Your name is on the manifest.”

“Of course I was on the plane. I told that to the other policemen.” Testy, impatient, a woman used to giving the orders and asking the questions. “Look, sergeant, I’m very busy. I’ve a hospital to run.”

“You did know that one of the other passengers on the plane, a man, was murdered yesterday morning?”

“So I was told. What’s that to do with me? You think I killed him? I was here, making rounds all night.”

“And you know, of course, that man was Robert Atlee.”

She blinked, furrowed her brow, frowned heavily. “Who?” A fine performance.

Andrew smiled. “Matron, I should think it unlikely that you’d be unfamiliar with this name, even if you hadn’t lived here in the Township during The Troubles. In the fifties, the man was a hero.”

“I didn’t live here during The Troubles,” she said. “I didn’t come here till afterward.”

“I’m sorry, matron, but that is untrue. The public library keeps very good records, among them a book written by a local European woman. It has photographs. And among those is a photograph of the staff of Dr. Hamilton’s clinic, which, as you know, preceded this hospital. In 1955, you were one of the three nurses working there.” She had been a striking woman then, tall, slender, proud.

She waved a hand dismissively. Brazening it out. “Yes, well, so what? Is that supposed to mean something?”

“It means that you would have known Robert Atlee. Would have known who he was, and possibly would have known him personally. His father owned the Atlee Ginnery, an important man. It means, in all likelihood, that you recognized him when you saw him on that plane two days ago.”

“Nonsense. Thirty years ago. Who recognizes people after all that time?”

“The two of you were on a small airplane for two hours, matron. Time enough for the memory to return. He had changed, certainly, but he was still recognizable.” She had changed as well, but more so; changed enough that Robert Atlee, had he once known her, had he noticed her on the plane, would never have guessed her identity.

“I think, too,” said Andrew, “that thirty years ago you would have recognized Abraham Mayani if you had seen him near Daniel Tsuto’s house.”

More blinking. “Abraham Mayani?” Her voice pitched a shade higher.

“I have learned that thirty years ago, Ronald Nu, the current Assistant Minister of the Interior, was a member of the G.S.U., which at the time was searching for Mayani. Bwana Nu had a woman friend here in the Township. This woman was a nurse. It was she who told Bwana Nu that she had seen Mayani. That woman was you, matron, was it not?”

“That’s ridiculous.” Bluster. “I wasn’t the only nurse in the Township then.”

“There were five nurses in the Township then. Three at Dr. Hamilton’s clinic, two at Dr. Hannah’s. All of them, except for you, were women in their forties or fifties.”

Trying for anger now, almost succeeding: “Sergeant, you’re wasting my time. Whoever told you about me and Minister Nu was lying. The only time I’ve seen the man was in the newspapers.”

Time to produce the famous sledgehammer.

Quietly, not at all enjoying this, Andrew said, “Mayani is still a hero, matron. And rumors travel quickly in this township. Life would not go well for someone who was accused of informing on him.”

She stared at him. She pursed her lips, took a long deep breath. “You can’t prove that.”

“No. But rumors do not require proof.”

She looked down at her desk, lifted a ballpoint pen, dropped it. Looked up. “What is it, exactly, you want from me?”

“Only the answer to a single question. When you recognized Robert Atlee on the airplane two days ago, did you notify Minister Nu that the man had returned to the Township?”

She stared at him again, longer this time. At last, firmly, decisively, she said, “No.” She stood, authority and command restored. “This is preposterous. I recognized no one. I notified no one. And now, sergeant, if you’ll excuse me. As I said, I’ve a hospital to run.”

Andrew, who had been leaning slightly forward, now abruptly experienced that feeling which obtains at the top of a stairway when one takes a step which, remarkably, is not there.

He looked at her face. Shuttered, blank. He stood. “Thank you, matron.”

The bloody woman was lying. She had to be.

His moped leaning on its kickstand at the beach road, fifty yards behind him, Andrew sat in the thin shade of a thorn tree atop a tall sand dune. To his right, far off, the minarets and gleaming high-rise luxury hotels of the Township. To his left, the tangle of bright green mangrove swamp stretching off into infinity. Below him, the beach, an empty expanse of bone white sand. Beyond that, the blue sea, empty as well, fiat and featureless out to the horizon.

She recognizes Robert Atlee on the plane. She follows him to his hotel. She informs Nu by telephone of Atlee’s location. Nu commandeers a ministry helicopter, flies to the Township, lands somewhere outside. As Daniel Tsuto had pointed out, this could be done with no one the wiser.

Nu goes to Atlee’s hotel. Kills him.

Why?

According to Daniel Tsuto, Nu had known Mayani. Mayani and Atlee were in the same G.S.U. company. Nu, therefore, had known Atlee.

Later, after the highjacking, Nu was in the township looking for Mayani. Mayani and Atlee had fled together. Suppose Nu found not Mayani but Atlee. Suppose he and Atlee worked a deal. Atlee’s life, and a share of the gold, in exchange for the rest of the gold and Mayani’s whereabouts. Nu kills Mayani, then helps Atlee escape.

Why help Atlee? Why not simply kill him?

Atlee, somewhere, has left a record of the transaction. If he dies, the facts will be revealed.

Yes. And so, for over thirty years now, Nu and Atlee keep their shameful secret. That they betrayed Mayani and stole the gold.

And then Atlee returns. Why?

Guilt? Greed? His share of the gold gone, he returns to threaten Nu with exposure?

No matter. Nu kills him.

But if the gold is gone, why then this secret hunt for it?

Ah, but how secret was it? Precisely secret enough to provide a major topic of gossip for the Township. The ministry helicopter landing at the airport in the middle of the night. Sergeant Mbutu snooping about the town, asking “discreet” questions which themselves were answers.

Not foolishness, as Daniel Tsuto had said, but slyness. The slyness of a jackal. If Nu pretends to believe the gold still exists — and by now the entire Township thinks he does — what motive has he for killing Robert Atlee?

All of this, if true, left Andrew in an interesting position. If he could find any proof to support these conjectures, he would soon have to accuse the Assistant Minister of the Interior, not a pleasant man at best, of murder.

When Andrew entered Bwana Teggay’s hotel room late that afternoon, to ask a series of what he hoped were carefully disguised questions, he saw that the man was packing. In a trim safari suit of beige Egyptian cotton, Teggay stood bent over his suitcase, arranging the clothes inside.

“Ah, Mbutu. Good to see you. You’ve heard, I suppose.”

“Heard?” Andrew said.

“About the confession.”

“Confession?”

Smiling his thin smile, carefully folding a pair of brown twill slacks into the suitcase, Teggay said, “So you haven’t heard. Well, you’re off the case. It’s closed. We got a confession just an hour ago. Apparently Atlee’s return had nothing to do with the gold. It seems he spent it all. Came back here for reasons of his own. Picked up some chippie on the beach, took her to his room, and tried a bit of rough and tumble. She stabbed him. It’s as simple as that. I’ve already called the minister and told him. He agrees it’s time to fold our tents.”

Believing what he did, Andrew would have found this story dubious in any event. That it sounded much like one of Cadet Inspector Moi’s notorious summaries only increased his distrust. He asked, “Who is the woman who confessed?”

Teggay shrugged. “A nobody. Some local nurse.”

“Do you know her name?”

The man told him, and Andrew suddenly understood.

Holding the library book, Andrew knocked at the front door. He waited for quite some time. No one came. He knocked again. Waited.

At last he turned away and followed the sandy path round the house and into the small enclosed back yard. Wearing the same clothes he had worn earlier, his hands in his lap, his shoulders slumped, the old man sat beneath the blossom-laden trellis, staring off at the wall of rosebush. The light was thinner now, the colors faded, the roses diminished. Soon the sun would set.

The old man sensed Andrew’s presence, for he looked up, squinted, then nodded once, expressionless. He looked off again at his roses.

Andrew said, “May I sit down, m’zee?”

“Yes.” Indifferently, without a glance.

Andrew sat, putting the book in his lap. For a moment he said nothing. In the trees somewhere a bird squawked, low and shrill.

Finally Andrew said, “Your granddaughter has confessed to the murder of Robert Atlee.”

“Yes,” said the old man.

“She was walking, she says, along the beach in front of the Sinbad when he approached her. They spoke. He asked her to his room. She went. He told her who he was. He was bragging, she says. He told her that he and Mayani had separated, Mayani leaving the gold with him. That he had taken the gold into the south and finally escaped, by freighter, to the United States. He told her he had wanted to see Africa one more time.”

The old man had not looked at him, had not moved. He might have been sitting alone, there in the lengthening velvet shadows of his garden.

“And then,” said Andrew, “he attempted to assault her. A powerful man, he subdued her easily. He removed his clothes. As he approached, she saw the knife on the nightstand, grabbed it, and used it. Then she left.”

The old man said nothing.

Andrew said, “None of this is true, m’zee.”

The old man frowned. He turned to Andrew.

Andrew said, “I spoke today with Elizabeth Harrambee, the matron at Uhuru Hospital. She was a nurse here during The Troubles. It was she who told Ronald Nu, thirty years ago, about seeing Mayani near your house. She knew not only Mayani, she knew Robert Atlee. Two days ago, she was on the same plane from the capital. She recognized him.”

Eyes blank, the old man watched Andrew.

Andrew said, “After I spoke with her today, m’zee, she came here. She was seen doing so — I made inquiries.”

Nothing from the old man.

“Your granddaughter is a nurse. It was as a nurse that she spent her exchange year in Sweden. Previous to that, she worked at Uhuru Hospital. I know this, m’zee, for I examined their records before coming here. I believe that she became friendly with Matron Harrambee.”

Only the blank watchful stare.

Andrew shifted slightly in his chair. “M’zee, everyone knows that you are the only person left alive in all the Township who had any connection to Robert Atlee and Mayani. I believe that when the matron saw Robert Atlee on the airplane, she notified your granddaughter. Out of friendship, perhaps. Perhaps out of a sense of guilt for what she had done before.”

Still nothing.

Andrew looked down at the ragged grass, darkening now as light seeped from the sky. He looked up. “M’zee, so far as the police and the ministry are concerned, this case is closed. The gold is gone, Robert Atlee is dead, your granddaughter has confessed.”

The old man watched.

Andrew took a deep breath and let it slowly out. “I would like to agree with this,” he said.

Without moving, his face still without expression, the old man spoke. “What will happen to her? To Joanna?”

Andrew shrugged. “It is her word against the word of a dead man. He was a hero, yes, but the story of taking the gold will tarnish the legend. She removed her fingerprints from the knife and placed Atlee’s on it. Not good, but she claims she was in panic. She is a local woman, and well-respected, and she confessed voluntarily. I expect that her story will be believed. At the very worst, manslaughter. Perhaps a year or two of jail. At the very worst. More likely, a suspended sentence. Assuming there is even a trial.”

The old man nodded. He smiled. “Thank you, sergeant.” He blinked once, twice, then turned to look off at his roses.

Andrew said, “Was it a fight? Between Robert Atlee and Mayani?”

The old man said nothing.

“I know Mayani was here after the highjacking, m’zee. Elizabeth Harrambee saw him. And by your own account, Mayani told you that Ronald Nu tried to recruit him into the secret faction within the G.S.U. This took place, you said, only two weeks before his father and sister were murdered, on June 21,1953.”

Andrew tapped the book on his lap. “This is a history of The Troubles, m’zee. Your name is often mentioned. Your principles, your opposition to violence. In June of 1953, you made a public statement about the murders of Joseph and Rebecca Mayani. But you made it, m’zee, in Dar Es Salaam, in Tanzania. You spent the entire month of June in Tanzania, with the African Teachers’ Union.”

The old man said nothing.

Andrew said, “So Mayani could not have told you about Ronald Nu at that time. Nor could he have told you about it throughout the next year. All of his operations took place in the western part of the country. The closest he came to the Township was the capital, several hundreds of miles away. The only time he could have told you was when he had come back to the Township, and that could only have been after the highjacking.”

The old man said nothing.

“It is possible, of course, that you traveled to the west to meet with him. But I think not, m’zee. You were a teacher, you had your classes here. Your family was here. You were involved with the union.”

Still staring at his roses, the old man smiled faintly. “David Obutu said you were a clever boy, sergeant. You’ve grown into a clever policeman.”

Andrew shook his head. “For the time being, m’zee, I am neither a policeman nor an agent of the ministry. Nothing said here has been said officially.”

Silence from the old man.

Andrew said, “It was a fight, m’zee?”

For a moment Andrew thought he would get no answer. Then, at last, without turning to him, the old man said, “Yes.”

“Here? At your house?”

“Here. In this garden.” His voice empty of emotion. “The two of them had managed to slip past the roadblocks. They stayed the night, hidden in the crawl space under the house. My son disposed of their horses. They fought early the next morning.”

“They fought over the gold,” Andrew said.

Studying his roses, the old man nodded. “Abraham was wounded and weak. Atlee wanted to leave him and take the gold. They struggled. Atlee struck him. I got Abraham’s gun. I forced Atlee to leave. I gave him enough gold to leave the country. He swore he’d come back one day.” Now the old man turned to face Andrew. “I sent my son with him, Joanna’s uncle. To make certain he didn’t return. They reached a freighter in the south. Before he went aboard, Atlee killed him. He strangled him.”

This Andrew had not expected. He frowned. “I’m sorry, m’zee.”

The old man nodded and looked away.

Andrew said, “Your granddaughter knew all this.”

The old man nodded.

“When she learned Atlee had returned, she knew he had come for the gold.”

The old man nodded.

“What did she tell Atlee? In his room?”

“That she was my granddaughter. That a friend of hers had recognized him. That she’d help him get the gold if he’d give her a portion of it.”

“He believed this?”

A quick, faint, ironic smile. “Women were always Atlee’s weakness. Women and greed.”

“The knife was hers?”

A nod. “She brought it back from Sweden, hidden in her baggage. It was a toy, a joke.”

“Did you know she planned to do this, m’zee?”

“No. I knew nothing until this afternoon, when the Harrambee woman came.”

“Why did she confess, m’zee?”

The old man turned to Andrew. “Harrambee was afraid that if you kept asking questions, sooner or later someone else would learn that she told Nu about Mayani. And afraid, too, that you’d learn she told Joanna about Atlee.” Another quick faint smile. “A woman who never learned, in thirty years, the value of keeping silent. She’ll never learn. Sooner or later she would’ve told someone about Joanna.”

Andrew nodded.

The old man said, “And Joanna realized that the search for the gold would continue unless she persuaded the authorities that it no longer existed. There was only one way to do that.”

He frowned. “What she did was wrong, sergeant. Killing Atlee.”

Andrew nodded.

“All my life,” the old man said, “I’ve believed that the ends never justify the means. That violence of any kind is evil. But Robert Atlee killed my son. I will not mourn the man.”

Andrew nodded. The old man turned to his roses.

For a while then, neither spoke. Overhead, the sky had become the color of lead. Night came quickly at that latitude.

Andrew said, “About the gold, m’zee.”

Slowly, the old man turned to him. “Do you care for gold, sergeant?” Only mild curiosity in his voice.

“Not this gold, m’zee.”

The old man smiled that faint smile. “You don’t wish for a Mercedes? For a big new house? For the pleasures of wealth?”

“I have what I need,” Andrew said. And realized, almost with a start, that this was true. Mary, the children. A house, a moped. And action figures into the bargain.

Another smile from the old man. “Wisdom is wealth.”

Andrew shrugged stiffly, felt his face flush. With embarrassment, with pleasure.

He said, “Your granddaughter’s last name is not yours. It will mean nothing to anyone in the ministry. But there is a possibility that Nu, or someone else, will make the connection. You might wish to consider this.”

Eyes narrowed slightly, the old man stared at him for a long moment. Then gave him a single small nod. “I thank you, sergeant. Arrangements will be made.”

He turned his back to his flowers. The silence grew. In the sky, stars were gleaming.

Andrew said, “You have done well with the gold, m’zee.”

The old man frowned. “I hope so, sergeant. I hope so. Difficult to say.”

The quick smile again as he looked to Andrew. “Tell me, sergeant. After your father’s death, after we left the money with your family, why didn’t you return to the university?”

Andrew shrugged. “I knew that my brother would put the money to better use.” He smiled. “And, to be honest, by then I had already determined to become a policeman.” He nodded to the old man. “But I am pleased, now, on behalf of my family, to be able to thank you, m’zee.”

“You’re most welcome, sergeant. It was Joanna who left the money. My daughter let her do it. That was her first time.” A smile. “A twelve-year-old girl. She kept secrets well even then.”

Andrew said, “She swore, in her confession, that Atlee told her Mayani had escaped to the west. To Zaire. That he still lives.”

The old man nodded, smiled. “We need our legends, sergeant. All of us.”

The two of them sat there in the shadows. The stars glittered in the violet sky with a hard white light above the cluster of rosebushes, a dim black form now, indistinct, shapeless as a cloud. A cloud that hovered, Andrew knew, above the plot of earth which for over thirty years had hid the gold, and the bones, of Mayani.